November 20, 2009

The Asian century, fact-based.

Well, I have to help restore karmic balance some way.

1 The G20 in 2050. Another data point adding to the emerging consenus that China will be the world’s largest economy in just over twenty years, barring political developments which the authors say they can’t predict.

I will try one prediction: there won’t have been a G20 for a long time by 2050.

2 This is supposed to be about India’s economic position in 2109, but it says more about China’s underrated position today: “The Chinese haircut industry alone might be larger than the economies of many small countries.” And so on.

Incidentally, both links show how very difficult it is to measure economies using GDP and the variations thereupon.

Flickr/bazril

October 24, 2009

Learning about Google Wave is not going well so far.

Screen shot

September 13, 2009

Moving cathedrals.

Courtesy of the Music Animation Machine. Best watched in full screen. A few observations:

1. I can’t even begin to decipher musical notation.

This animation told me a lot more about the structure of the first movement of the Fifth in real time than I think I would have learned in hours poring over the sheet music, or even through listening again and again to the symphony itself.

Not everything – I don’t know how you could graphically represent time signature, for example. But enough.

2. If this animation was converted into an augmented reality iPhone app, for use by concertgoers during performances – if you could understand what was going on in the latest avant-garde work in the moment, or you could overlay the interpretations that had been made of one symphony by different orchestras – well, that would be really cool.

3. It looks a bit like the Arecibo message, and even a bit reminiscent of the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is pleasing.

August 28, 2009

Nouus Orbis.

The lovely Maira Kalman on discovery, citizenship, and migration in the story of American democracy.

One million people became citizens of the United States last year, compared to 660 000 in 2007; 2.4 million in total between 2006 and 2008.

I think that, buried in the immigration statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, there must be enough individual stories of nightmares escaped and American dreams won (or lost) to keep a thousand Joseph O’Neills busy for the next thousand years.

Which puts this news in world-historical perspective.